Welcome to my blog, featuring my musings on my life, my family, the news, politics, and best of all - Pop culture: Movies, TV, video games, and music.
Posts are categorized as follows -
PCP: Pop Culture Panorama. FML: Fatherhood Means Laughter. POS: Politics or Stupidity. As you may notice, I like witty acronyms. Follow the links on the right for posts under each section.

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Tuesday, June 18, 2013

PCP on DVD - Looper

After Prometheus, the other big sci-fi film that I was most looking forward to from 2012 was Looper. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is one of my favorite actors working today, I'll gladly watch anything starring him. Add in Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Jeff Daniels, and an intriguing plot involving time travel, and I am there.

Looper - 2012, rated R. My rating: 9 out of 10.

"I don't want to talk about time travel because if we start talking about it then we are going to be here all day talking about it, making diagrams with straws."
The quote above highlights one of the problems with any film that deals with time travel, the potential for massive paradoxes and confusing circular reasoning. Considering the whole plot of the film has to do with time loops and how actions in one time can impact the other, it is actually a pretty funny quote uttered by one of the characters, because your brain can hurt a little bit trying to sort out the temporal mechanics of the time travel paradoxes created by this film.

I do not want to spoil the film too much, so I will stick to basics without going into too many details. In the far future, time travel has been invented and it is outlawed, so of course the mafia has access to the technology. In that future, technology has gotten so advanced that it is literally impossible to get away with murder. So to solve their problem, the mob sends people they want whacked back in time to the not so far future, where they can be killed and disposed of by specialized hit men called loopers. JGL is one of those loopers, and he has a massive problem on his hands when one of his targets, Bruce Willis, gets away from him. The catch: Willis is JGL, just 30 years older.

There are some interesting twists and turns along the way in the film, directions the plot takes that I do not want to discuss here so as not to spoil the film for anyone that has not seen it. What I can say is that this was a very interesting and unique film, and it tried its best to solve the troubles with time travel in novel and creative ways. The acting performances are pretty solid, especially from JGL and Emily Blunt. I'm really glad I watched this movie, even if trying to sort out all of the time loops gave me a bit of a headache. If you haven't seen this already, I strongly encourage you to go check it out.

If you want to discuss the plot in more spoilery detail, hit me up in the comments and we can discuss it there.